


What If We Could?

by LaShaRa



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Misunderstandings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:21:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24157276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaShaRa/pseuds/LaShaRa
Summary: When he sees her again, it is after Vesper, but before M. At least, this is how he remembers it later, this is where he slots her back into his life, a stone blade landing hilt-up between the milestones of loss that line his life: unexpected, unimaginable, chaos.
Relationships: James Bond & Lisbeth Salander, James Bond/Q, Mikael Blomkvist/Lisbeth Salander
Comments: 8
Kudos: 21





	1. Chaos

When he sees her again, it is after Vesper, but before M. At least, this is how he remembers it later, this is where he slots her back into his life, a stone blade landing hilt-up between the milestones of loss that line his life, unexpected, unimaginable, chaos.

( _ You sentimental bastard,  _ says the voice that lives in the back of his head, the voice that sounds, the more the years roll on, like Q). 

The job is on the outskirts of Utrecht and it’s a simple one, compared to the rest of his jobs these days. One target. One untraceable bullet. No consequences of the world-ending variety, no searingly vital information to be carried back to MI6 in his head, no loose ends to hunt down. Just one man. A milk run, possibly as punishment for Budapest last month, which was more of a clusterfuck than anything else, and Bond is irritated, because M should really know better by now, but Q is happy he's not getting shot at for once, and that does count for something. So he does the job and now he’s tidying up, setting the scene for the Dutch police whose sirens are still distant, whose movements Q is automatically relaying to his earpiece, and then a voice from the doorway that should have been sealed says, “Mikael?”

He spins, right into the barrel of the gun that she has leveled at his chest, and the sirens are wailing closer and Q in his ear is saying “Bond, what the  _ fuck _ is going on, report -” but he has time to meet those large, dark eyes that he remembers like he saw them yesterday, time to stretch out a hand, time to say “ _ Lisbeth -” _

The windows explode inward.

There is chaos for a while, but chaos is what Bond does best. Well, that’s not quite right, it’s not just Bond now, and Q unlocks doors and causes intersection pileups and scorches digital earth in a clipped, professional voice that sets Bond’s teeth on edge, but he pushes forward, because the chaos comes first and always has. Sixty hours later, he manages to make his flight back to the UK by a matter of minutes; he’s sinking gingerly into his seat in first class when his earpiece emits the distinctive chirp that signals Q’s transition to a private line. “Q-” 

“She sent me a message.”

Bond seizes the arm of his seat; his sprained shoulder makes its presence felt. A stewardess gives him a concerned glance; Bond hitches his mouth into a grimace of a smile until she turns away, then hisses, “ _ Q - ” _

“She contacted me through one of my aliases. From before,” Q says over him, still in that clipped voice. “In and out of the system like hot knives through butter. She’s - brilliant. Of course, she’s quite mad as well, but I suppose you two needed something over which to bond.”

Bond swallows. There's something like glass in his throat and a sharp pain at this temple, like dental floss being stitched through skin. This is not something he can fix - not from here, not right now. He has, however, known Q long enough to know when holding back will hold the situation together. This is not one of those times. “Q,” he says a third time, soft and almost inaudible through the sound of the jet engines powering up. “What did she  _ say? _ ”

The ensuing silence is so long that Bond thinks Q’s rung off. He sighs roughly and is about to yank out the earpiece when Q’s answering sigh comes over the connection, harsh and sad and pained. “ _ Tell Mikael he owes me a coffee.  _ I, for one, thought your coffee-drinking days were behind you, 007, but it seems I'm mistaken. Enjoy your flight back to Britain.” There’s a sudden whine of feedback that makes Bond jerk a little in his seat and then Q’s gone. 

The airplane starts to taxi and Bond drops his head back against the seat, aching. Chaos, he thinks, and there’s so much riding on the thought that he thought he left behind, pain and pure joy and the light of morning on dark, tousled heads.

Chaos. 


	2. Violet

Lisbeth cannot settle. She paces the house, cellar to attic, over and over for hours, stopping only to replenish the glass tumbler in her hand with whatever alcohol is nearest. She is calm enough to refrain from drinking straight from the bottle; she is no longer in her twenties, and liquor is just one of the things that hits differently now.

She remembers her twenty-second birthday like it was yesterday. She was in Amsterdam, where she’d been for less than two months at that point, the results of her latest hacking project having necessitated a sudden relocation. Another tiny attic apartment in the eastern part of the city, in a repurposed warehouse building by the waterfront. She’d spent half the day in the bed she’d pushed up against the skylight and then she’d gone outside and walked up and down the quay, huddled in her coat, watching the gulls and the houseboats and the ships that loomed like lost icebergs out of the canal. On a rare whim, she’d braved the waterfront shops, walking through every aisle until she’d found exactly what she wanted, and then she’d gone back to watch the gulls until the rain came down in earnest. It was a quiet, violet day, as many of them had become by then, and it had been enough for her, because she knew all the other ugly colours that days could be. 

Mikael - and he had been Mikael then, the way he is still Mikael to her, regardless of the names he now goes by - had shown up at her door while she was shaking the silver sprinkles onto the chocolate cake, frustrated because they kept rolling straight off. He’d stood at her kitchen counter dripping rainwater onto the floor and put the cake in the oven so the icing would melt enough for the sprinkles to stick. She hadn’t seen him in three months, because the job that had sent her to Amsterdam had been the one she took to get him safely out of Copenhagen. He’d brought her a bottle of pink wine and two glasses, because all she had were chipped mugs and he was strange about things like that. “Trust me,” he’d said, holding out a half-full glass, and she did, and the wine was sweet and smooth and fizzy, not at all like she remembered wine being, and they ate the cake with teaspoons, sitting cross-legged on the floor. 

He’d slept next to her in the rickety bed under the skylight, that night and the next and the next. The next time she had to move he followed her and the time after that, she followed him. He slept next to her in Seville, and in Alsace, and in Galway, and she could have gone on forever that way, falling asleep with her nose in his collarbone and waking up with his arm around her ribcage, except that one morning two weeks after her twenty-sixth birthday she rolled over to wake him up because they needed to get to Heathrow and found instead a sheet of folded paper that she’d only needed to read once. 

She has slept alone since then in many beds, in many cities across the world. She is thirty-five now, an age that seemed unfathomable to the girl she was a lifetime ago, and the house she is pacing now is tucked into a quiet corner Klagenfurt, which has been kind to her in the way that many Austrian cities have been kind to her. Mikael must be over fifty, and though she had tried, after he left, to avoid all recollection of him, she’d known enough of his new life to find it unfathomable that he had cleared the half-century himself. She had never expected to see him again and yet the memory of his gas-flame eyes looking at her across the body of a man in a hotel room in Utrecht is as familiar to her as the memory of the man who walked into her apartment bearing breakfast like it was a white flag that would save him, all those years ago. 

She has slept alone, but he has not, because joining MI6 does not encourage such ascetic tendencies and besides - 

Q.

To her Mikael is Mikael, but to the Quartermaster of MI6 he is James Bond, Agent 007, and Lisbeth had got on the first train she could safely catch out of Utrecht because she was shaking too hard to get on the bike and she’d hacked into MI6 with less finesse than any job she’d done in her decade, just to be caught, just to leave a message. The Quartermaster of MI6 had intercepted her himself and she’d lingered in the system just long enough to make sure he knew who she was before she’d erased all trace of herself and left by the same route she took into Britain’s systems. She had no doubt that had she not covered her tracks, he would have done it for her, because they are not the kind of people who let other people fight their battles if they can help it. 

Armed with a computer and over a decade of experience, Lisbeth is one of the most dangerous people in the world, but she doesn’t want to be, which is why so few people even know she exists. The Quartermaster of MI6 is another of the most dangerous people in the world, and he wants to be, which is why they call him Q. In an ideal world their paths would never have crossed - 

\- except that this is not an ideal world, and in this less than ideal world, both their paths have crossed with the same less than ideal man.

Mikael Blomkvist.

James Bond.

Lisbeth drains her glass. She collects the empty bottles lining her house from cellar to attic and puts them out by the bins. The sun is rising over the mountains in the distance. On her way up to bed, she books a train ticket to Vienna, and a plane ticket to London. She lies on top of the covers and watches through the east window as the day turns from violet to rose, then gold, then gas-flame blue. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I played around with the ages and backstories a little here, obviously. I'm still not sure where this is going - Lisbeth is turning out differently than I'd imagined her.


	3. Pasts

Q had known, of course, that James Bond had several pasts.

MI6 recruited Bond first, but the Internet was always Q’s weapon to wield, long before he ever crossed paths with the steel-haired, iron-willed woman who decided to put the fate of Her Majesty’s finest in the hands of a man who still had spots. So Q knows things about James Bond that he’s never been told, things that Olivia Mansfield suspected, things that Gareth Mallory may not even know to ask about. Q knows about Skyfall, knows that somewhere in the Scottish highlands two weathered headstones are still standing outside a hollow Kirk, knows the ground around them is still seeded with ash; he knows there is a shaggy, fire-tinged man who moved to a village forty kilometres off, still mourning the boy he once led out of darkened tunnels, and a burned out shell of an Aston Martin somewhere in the bowels of Q-Branch, behind a door to which only two people have access. Q knows about orphans and cuckoos and blue-eyes monsters and maidens both. Q knows many things he has never been told.

And Q knows that at some point between the planting of those headstones far out in the Scottish wilderness and the first time someone broke into Olivia Mansfield’s home and lived to tell the tale, a curious story surfaced in Sweden, of a financial journalist who, in running from a job that had left him humiliated, took another job that nearly left him spectacularly dead. Q knows that this journalist then went to ground for half a decade, resurfacing briefly across Europe to break sensational, career-making stories for which he never took credit, often involving powerful, shadowy people with the kind of secrets that had been too nebulous to ever be investigated until the stories broke, both in the newspapers and across the Internet. And Q knows that one day this journalist, who had kept the name Mikael Blomkvist, vanished as if he had never existed, roughly a few weeks before a man who would one day be codenamed 007 walked into MI6 with no credentials and asked for M by her real name.

Since then, James Bond has shot people and seduced people and exploded people and saved people all over the world and at some point, somewhere between Skyfall and Silva, he stole Q’s heart. Mikael Blomksvist never reappeared and whoever he was following, whoever made sure the internet never forgot the stories he’d broken, went to ground, even though the information kept coming, often brought forward by other young, passionate journalists who cited only an anonymous, unfailing source. It was one of those phenomena that MI6, and by extension Q-Branch, kept tabs on; someone was doing something that could, in certain lights, be seen as MI6’s job. It was a mystery, and Q disliked mysteries on principle, but recent years had brought him enough that were close to home, that had to be dealt with first. And the many pasts of James Bond had seemed less of a problem than the dwindling lives of James Bond -

\- until yesterday, when what should have been a routine mission was interrupted by a stunned, foreign voice saying Mikael, shattering everything Q knew to pieces; until the message had come through, a coded knife slipping in and out of Q’s systems with the kind of finesse that would have put Silva to shame, tell Mikhail he owes me a coffee and nothing more, nothing else needed, shots fired, a statement. 

Q has consumed seventeen cups of tea at his desk in Q-Branch by the time Bond makes it onto his plane home and R wrests the eighteenth cup from his hands and sends him home. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon in London and Q drinks five more cups at his favourite tea shop, one of six that Bond still hasn’t found, and then he goes home, his hands shaking so hard that he nearly gets the access codes wrong and blows up the entire block of flats. Mallory would not be happy, he thinks, as he sheds his clothes in the hallway and heads for the loo, Mallory would not be happy if he knew what Q knew, but Q erased the footage and the message, the pasts of James Bond are Q’s to know, for better or worse. He turns up the water so high that he scalds himself, then gets out and into Bond’s shirt, his own pyjama bottoms. He paces and paces and paces the sitting room until the sun goes down; the cats wake up and follow him, mewling in anxiety, and he can’t bring himself to pick them up so he flees out onto the fire escape and thinks, as he hauls himself up, that he really is a coward.

Bond finds him still sitting on the edge of the roof at half-past ten, staring out over London. Bond has the blanket from their sofa slung over his shoulder and his hair is damp from the shower. He puts the blanket around Q’s shoulders and sits down beside him. “Hello, Q.”

“Hello, James,” says Q and feels abruptly lightheaded, unmoored. Bond’s hand closes around his knee. “Q,” he says, voice rough like the whisky that’s sat untouched in Q’s kitchen for weeks. “It’s me,” he says, and Q knows he means it’s James and it’s what he needs and it isn’t, because it means it’s real, the possibility that he could have been someone else.

“Lisbeth Salander,” he says, because neither of them have said it yet, out loud, all of it. “Her flight lands at Heathrow at two o’clock tomorrow. She hasn’t booked a hotel yet and I don’t know yet who she’s contacted.” He clears his throat. “She has, however, rented a motorbike.”

Bond chuckles, and it’s a broken thing, pulled out of him like a crooked tooth. Q’s gut clenches. He stares out over London and brushes a hand over the hand Bond still has on his knee. “I’m not - whatever it was, I won’t - if you want - ”

“Q.” Bond turns his hand over and laces his fingers through Q’s. “It wasn’t like that. I don’t know what it was like.” He takes a breath. “It wasn’t like Vesper. Or Madeleine. It wasn’t like any of that.”

They sit in silence for a while. Sirens wail dimly in the distance. The brickwork is cold. Q is trying to make up his mind to suggest a cup of tea when Bond says, very quietly:

“You don’t remind me of her, but she reminded me of you. I hadn’t even met you yet - I could never have imagined meeting you - but she reminded me of you.”


	4. Collide

There is a whole week where nothing happens. 

Lisbeth Salander’s flight does, indeed, land at Heathrow in the early hours of the morning; however, she then proceeds to evade both the waiting MI6 personnel and every one of Q’s formidable surveillance systems and vanishes completely. Sitting at the back of Q’s home office, Bond watches the quartermaster speeding through screen after screen, camera footage and transaction records and witness statements flashing like lightning in the shadowy room. It’s well after sunrise and perilously close to when they should both be en route to M16 when Q’s shoulders slump like his strings have been cut; he takes off his glasses, stands up and walks over to the window, staring blindly out at the city blaring to life below. Bond slips quietly from the room to start the tea brewing and replenish the automatic cat food dispenser; when he returns, the screens are dark and Q is dressing himself in their bedroom. Bond leans in the doorway and watches him fold up the cuffs of his cardigan; it’s the grey one, striped severely in navy and ash. Bond has been around long enough to know it’s what Q wears when he’s disappointed in himself. 

Bond says, “Thank you for trying.”

Q stares into the mirror, brushes back his hair. There’s a flash of needle-thin silver, quickly hidden; Bond is reminded, painfully, that Q is turning forty this year, that some days Q looks far older. “A breach is a breach,” he says. “I would be derelict in my duties as the quartermaster if I didn’t try to locate her. Although it may not even matter, seeing as she clearly lives up to her reputation.”

The tea has steeped too long and the cats are snatching at each other, but Bond remains where he is. “She is...excellent at camouflage,” he says carefully. He’s not sure of himself, suddenly. He’s seen Q furious with himself after Silva and furious with Bond after Spectre, for how impossible it made his duties. But this is different. This is something more than simple professional frustration or concern at the evidence of a security risk. Q turns from the mirror and walks towards Bond. “Oh, I’m aware,” says Q, and his eye are full of shifting colours. “After all, she covered your tracks for five years. No mean feat, as I can personally attest.” He heads in the direction of the kitchen, calling out to the cats and leaving Bond behind. 

It’s the last time they talk about it. The week is a whirlwind of tedious, sleepless nights interspersed with heart-stopping, chaotic check-ins with agents (Q) and surly debriefings interspersed with malicious scuffles with everyone from Medical to Moneypenny (Bond). It’s what passes for normal, for them; Bond is on standard post-mission leave after Utrecht, and when he’s not causing mayhem he retreats to the couch in Q’s office with a paperback he doesn’t read. Q talks 006 out of scaling the side of the Taj Mahal in pursuit of a target and tinkers with new wrist tasers for 004 and staunchly does not comment on the fact that Bond only leaves MI6 if Q is with him, and Bond loves him for it. Q’s schedule being what it is, they only make it back to the flat three nights out of seven anyway; the trips there and back are without incident, the cats have clearly been occupying the sofa all day, and on the third night Q is relaxed enough to drop off into deep, softly snoring REM sleep, from whence he has to be dragged by Bond, loudly protesting, and makes it to the interdepartmental review with M by the skin of his teeth. Bond smiles to himself and wanders down to Research. R is much more generous when pointing out which experimental weapons require testing when her immediate superior is in meetings. 

The fourth night they manage to leave M16 is unexpectedly balmy, a clear, slow evening left over from summer. They leave the car in the garage but backtrack a few streets, at Bond’s suggestion, to a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese place that Q has always loved. Q brightens like he hasn’t all week, stealing mushrooms off Bond’s plate and flicking noodles around as he rails in code against R's insubordination; when Bond reaches for his hand on the walk back, he curls his fingers around Bond’s. It’s an indulgence, as all security risks are, but Bond can’t bring himself to care. Q has had every camera within a five-street radius commandeered since they moved in anyway. It’s a quiet neighborhood on a Sunday night, and as they turn the corner onto their street Bond crowds closer, tucks Q’s arm into his; Q huffs, but grins up at him in a way that promises many things.

There is a motorcycle parked outside their building, a slim figure leaning against it. 

Bond is in front of Q in seconds, the Walther in his hands; behind him Q is scrabbling for his phone, cursing under his breath. Bond scans the street he’s cased a thousand times, but can’t see any other visible threats; his head is pounding, faces and voices and bullets he didn't fire from the one life he thought he’d buried swirling back into existence. He spares a split-second to wonder why this reaction is so different from the first time and then he realizes he already knows; Q is at his back, barely hidden from view, Q who is in some ways the most vulnerable of all of them, who is even now saying, “Damn it to hell, she’s back in the system. I’m alerting MI6.”

“No.” Bond begins to advance down the street, even through the distance that opens between himself and Q tears at him like a violent, living thing. It closes a moment later when Q hurries after him, still tapping at his phone to try and reclaim the cameras. “Bond, please tell me you’re not about to do something infuriatingly predictable.”

“Very well, I won’t tell you,” says Bond, adrenaline driving him to make the quip, knowing he’ll pay for it later. If there is a later. But then the figure in front of them steps away from the bike and Bond stops, narrows his focus, gets ready to line up his shot. 

And then that voice he would know anywhere calls across the ten metres left between them. “I really am just here for that coffee, Mikael.”

Bond does not move. Q is a silent, suddenly unreadable presence just behind him, his hands gone still around his phone. Ten metres ahead of them, the figure steps into the glow of a streetlamp and pulls back the hood of their sweater; there is a flash of silver rings, a fall of indigo hair. “Although I suppose I should call you James, now.” 

Bond remembers it then, the last time he saw her, on the last day he’d called himself Mikael Blomkvist. They’d been in London and it was three in the morning and when he stumbled into the kitchenette of their tiny studio flat, wired and weary with the knowledge of what he was about to do, what he needed to do, she’d been sitting in the window with her laptop, lost in the code. She’d been wearing one of his hoodies, so old that he couldn’t remember when she’d stolen it, and her hair was a wild frenzy around her head; after years of joint buzzcuts she’d started letting it grow out two months ago and had no idea what to do with it. She’d looked moon-pale and ferociously intense and awkwardly posed in that moment and she was beautiful to him in a way that still surprised him and he remembered being so hatefully relieved at how deeply she could fall into a screen, because he needed her to not read his face. 

Later, when she’d crashed into bed, mumbling about catching an hour of sleep before meeting their client at the airport, he’d pretended to be asleep. Hadn’t reached for her as she started to dream, because he knew himself, knew he would not be able to let go again. Had rolled out of bed at first light, dressed, come back to put down the letter he’d only had hours to write, that was nowhere near what she deserved, but would at least explain that he needed to go to MI6 because she couldn’t go to Heathrow. And then he’d left, hating himself just a little more when she never even stirred, because she had trusted everything about him by then, from the catch of his feet on the floorboards to his hand closing the door behind him and he wouldn’t have been able to leave without it, wouldn’t have been able to trade Blomkvist for Bond.

Now, Bond stands on the pavement outside the second home he built, next to the man with whom he shares the second home he built, and reels as Mikael Blomkvist's last precious memory, of dark tousled hair in the light of morning, collides with the woman standing in from of him, the woman who cannot be anyone except Lisbeth Salander. There are details that snag at him - the heeled boots, the forest-green sweater, the waist-length indigo hair, the absence of piercings - because the woman he knew wore her favourite armour to battle, and this isn't it. But then there’s the leather jacket, the silver flashes on hands and ears and throat - and the eyes. She looks at him as she did through a doorway in Utrecht, as she did the last time they shared a meal, laughing and stealing the last of the fries. Dimly, he registers himself holstering the Walther. Dimly, he feels Q’s hand on his arm. 

“Ms. Salander,” says Q, and his voice is as steady as a bullet in flight, his voice is the voice of the Quartermaster of MI6 taking control of a volatile situation, and Bond clutches at that voice like a lifeline as, once again, his pasts and present collide. “Pleased to finally make your acquaintance. I think we could all use that cup of coffee.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been thinking about this chapter for ages and I'm just glad it's out there now. Bond and Q feel different than they do in Meeting The Family, so it'll be fun to see where that goes. Thank you for sticking with this piece  
> \- feedback is appreciated! :)


	5. From Hedestad To Heiligenblut

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little gritter. Nothing too graphic, but I've updated the tags just in case.

It is the strangest of places to remember at this moment, and yet standing here in front of the first man she truly loved, in the same dark city where he left her behind, all she can think about is that small, hallowed, snowed in-town, nestled in where the highway up to Austria’s highest mountain pass began. She is not sure, because there were many towns like it, before and since, but she thinks it was called Heiligenblut. Holy blood.

It had snowed all day, she remembers, and it was still snowing when she finally made it back to the tiny lodge they’d picked as their base, somewhere close to midnight. She’d sunk the snowmobile in a lake twelve kilometres back; there had been no feeling left in her body. Somewhere up on the Grossglockner was the first man she’d killed since Hedestad. If his body was ever found it would be when summer thawed out the ravine where she’d led him; if they were lucky, they would find the gates of his private chalet still unlocked from the inside, the empty bottles still on the kitchen table. She doubted it, though; the glacier was ancient and it kept what it was given. 

Mikael hadn’t wanted her to go alone. He’d flung open the door as she staggered out of the final stretch of woods, his lips nearly as blue as hers; by the time she made it inside he was shivering in the thin shirt he wore over his bandages. The dead man had sent men after them; they were dead now too, but not before they’d extracted a pound or two of flesh from Mikael. She’d agreed to call off the mission and then she’d taken the snowmobile over the glacier while he slept, counting on exhaustion and pain and the extra glass of whiskey to keep him under until it was too late to try fetching her back. 

She’d fumbled herself out of her layers, ice shedding and cracking around her boots, the shivering setting in hard, and he’d left the room, because he knew better than to touch her then. She’d spent two hours in the cramped bathtub, thawing herself out by painful slow degrees and when she came out of the bathroom he’d built up the fire in the bedroom and was sitting on the bed, his bare feet flat on the floorboards. His lips had pinked up but his face was still drawn tight. She climbed into bed, still stiff from the snow, and sat crossed-legged, a metre of space between them. She doesn’t remember now how long it took before she was able to make herself lean over into his shoulder; she knows it was longer still before he could make himself curl an arm up and around her body, before his lips landed in the damp tufts of her still-short hair. 

“It hurt to kill him,” she’d admitted, into the bandages over his collarbone. 

She’d felt him breathe, long and pained. “I know,” he’d said, and that was all. 

Then he’d kissed her, deep and fearful and desperate. She’d been twenty-three then and he’d been forty and in the years since Hedestad all they’d ever done together was sleep, but now he’d moved first, and he had always been so careful to never ask her for anything. She kissed him back, let him pull from her body the hoodie he’d taken off a washing line in Seville and which she’d immediately stolen, let him bear her down to the bed, let him engulf her. It hadn’t hurt to let him and it wasn’t like Hedestad; it was something that went beyond pleasure or pain. Her hands, which only six hours ago had pushed a killer of women with his trousers around his ankles off a glacial precipice, found Mikael’s hands and held on. He’d never stopped kissing her; there was blood on the bandages holding his torso together, smearing into her skin like blotting paper. When she shuddered and arched off the bed, a few seconds before him, the expression on his face was at once familiar and absolutely foreign to her: wild, yearning, wrecked, tear-studded, the face of a man broken open with love. It stunned her to realize that she could recognize it. Afterwards, curled on her side and still holding his hands to her chest, she stared through the dark window glass at the lights of Heiligenblut across the valley and accepted, shaken, that the recognition had come from within herself. 

It shakes her more than she cares to admit, realizing that James Bond is wearing that same face now. 

Th Quartermaster of M16 is pretending he hasn’t seen it. He is in the kitchen, rattling cupboards. Lisbeth is in an armchair in the sitting room of a fourth floor London flat; the colour palette is brighter than anywhere she’s ever lived. There is a pile of circuit boards on the coffee table and a pile of cat hair under the rug. 

“They think it’s a game.” James Bond is sitting on the sofa across from her. His feet are planted flat on the other end of the rug. His hair is nearly all silver. “Niklaus and Elio. The objective is to hide their own hair before Q can hide it for them.”

“Lies and slander!” calls the Quartermaster of M16. “They contribute absolutely nothing to the Great Fur Vanishing Exercise. It’s all a conspiracy.” He bustles into the sitting room, bearing a tray. The coffee mugs have cat ears. Lisbeth takes one because she has no idea what she’ll do with her hands otherwise. Without looking she knows that Bond’s hand is trembling as he takes a sip from his mug and replaces it on the tray; then the Quartermaster sits down beside him and takes his hand and the trembling, amazingly, stops. Lisbeth drinks her coffee. There is far too much sugar. 

“Ms. Salander.” The mug makes no sound when the Quartermaster -  _ Q,  _ Bond calls him - replaces it on the tray. “May I ask what brings you to London? My excellent coffee-making skills aside.”

Bond snorts, very quietly. Lisbeth catalogues the sound faster than thought, catches herself doing it, continues anyway. Mikael hadn’t had much cause to laugh, after Hedestad, but when he did it was usually with her. Now, Bond is looking at Q and saying, “There’s enough sugar in one of these mugs to take out an entire hospital wing of diabetics, love.”

_ Love.  _ This is a novelty, to her at least - the Quartermaster hasn’t reacted to it. So Bond is the kind of man to favour endearments in casual conversation. Or perhaps he’s nervous. She doesn’t know how to read him anymore; she certainly can’t read Q, who scoffs and says, “Well,  _ you’re  _ not diabetic, by some miracle, so I don’t see why it matters. Anyway, don’t change the subject. Ms. Salander?”

She has to say something. After all, whatever James Bond might have been, that doesn’t change the fact that he is currently the most unexpectedly dangerous agent ever hired by M16, rivalled only by the man sitting next to him. Despite all of her years doing what she does, she is outclassed in this room, in more ways than one. She hacked every camera in the neighbourhood and looped the footage while they were at dinner and there are two knives and a gun in the holster under her arm, not the Glock she carried in Utrecht but the silver revolver that Mikael gave her three weeks after Hedestad - but none of it matters. Over a decade of running, and she has come full circle, she realizes suddenly, sat in a room with men who could destroy her, if they so choose.

It throws her, so perhaps that’s why she doesn’t realize what she’s about to say until she says it. “I wanted to know if it was real.”

She looks at Bond. The wildness has drained from his expression; she imagines it being drawn from his body to the Quartermaster’s by way of their clasped hands, dissipated and diluted between them; in its place a stillness settles over his features, a sharpening of the senses. This is Agent 007, the man directly responsible for more than triple the number of deaths in nine years then either of them engineered in six, and she does not know this man. She picked the right question. “This man you have become,” she continues, before either of them can ask. “James Bond. And the man you were to me. Mikael Blomkvist. I wanted to know who was real.”

“But do you need to know?”

It’s Bond who asks the question, his voice so quiet there is no inflection in it, and this surprises her, because she had expected him to be defensive, not to concede. “No. I don’t  _ need  _ to know,” she says, feeling her way through the words, feeling the truth of them. “But I would like to know.”

“Why?” The Quartermaster lets go of Bond’s hand and pushes his glasses back up his nose, down which they have slipped. His eyes flash like ocean water, and Lisbeth notes detachedly that he is beautiful, in a youthful, schoolboy-ish way that is utterly foreign to her. “You hacked one of the foremost intelligence agencies in the world - ironically, one of the few whose file on you contains recruitment tactics instead of a kill order - to  _ directly message  _ the head of its digital operations about an agent under his protection, who just so happens to be his partner, not to mention the darling of MI6. Which would have been madness enough, but then you get on a plane, fly to England, and stroll right up to my front door, to ask said partner a question you had, what, fifteen years to ask? Why now, Ms. Salander?”

It’s a good question, she thinks. Why, indeed?

She still remembers what it felt like to wake up that morning they were supposed to get to Heathrow, to reach out and find only cold paper under her hands. The numbness that fell over her like snow and sank deep into her skin as she parsed through the chicken scratch handwriting that was harder to decipher than actual code. What stayed with her was not his explanation of why the Heathrow meet was a set up, of how long MI6 had been chasing them, of how he’d made a mistake and they had made a deal, come in and give himself up and his associate would go free, how he couldn’t see a way out. What had stayed with her was how he asked her not to follow him, how he underlined the words twice; how he said he was sorry, but he didn’t sign his name or say goodbye. She got out of bed, burned the letter in the sink, then gutted the flat, kept only her go-bag and her laptop. Before the sun was fully over the horizon she was speeding out of London in a rented car; by nightfall she was in France. It was autumn, but the lodge in Heiligenblut was unoccupied. As she stepped out of the bathtub, wired with jetlag and still chilled from the drive into the mountains, she reached for his hoodie and then the memory of throwing it into a garbage bag on top of their bedsheets broke over her like an avalanche. She made an abortive movement, as if to run outside to fetch it, then remembered that over a thousand kilometres lay between her and London, and that the garbage was long gone. The pain began then; she lost time. When she resurfaced, there was a Christmas tree at the main roundabout in Heiligenblut and any chance of following Mikael, if it had ever existed, had vanished. 

It had never occurred to her to follow him in the first place. It is one of those things she avoided thinking about after those first blinding months, another thing that is suddenly on the surface now. She listened, because it didn’t occur to her to not, and because even in her numbness there was a simmering anger in her, a perverse sense of being justified. He’d done the thing they didn’t do; he’d left her. And he’d had the gall to tell her not to follow her. So be it; so she wouldn’t look for him. The question of whether she should have didn’t occur to her until far too late.

“You didn’t sign your name,” she settles for saying, and by the way Bond lowers his eyes she knows he catches her meaning. “Bond or Blomskvist? I didn’t know who you were when you left that day. Whether you were the man you were in Heiligenblut - or this.”

Bond looks back up at her. There are shadows in the corners of his eyes. “Would it have made a difference?” he asks.

“If I’d known in that moment that you were who you were in Heiligenblut, I would have followed you anyway,” she says, throwing caution to the winds. “I would have followed you anywhere. But I didn’t know. So I didn’t. And now you are - not one of the things we feared, but something else. So I need to know. Who was real, on the day you left me. Because at least then I’ll know if I could have done anything to stop it.”

The room is very quiet. If Lisbeth focuses, she can hear the faint hum of traffic at street level, but nothing beyond that. For a moment she’s not even sure Bond is breathing, but then he gets to his feet. He doesn’t look at her, or at the Quartermaster. He walks with measured steps across the sitting room and down a passageway beyond. She hears no doors or windows open or shut, but after a few minutes the air in the room shifts and she is suddenly certain that James Bond is no longer on the premises. 

Very carefully, the Quartermaster begins picking up the coffee mugs by the tips of their ears and placing them on the tray. Lisbeth watches his hands; they are slim and delicate, which she expected, but also cross-hatched with scars, which she did not. “Perks of the trade,” he says, not looking up. “I’m sure you can relate.”

“To some extent,” Lisbeth replies. While she’s no stranger to the more physically intensive side of their business, she has always been more at home working via a screen than with its component parts. The Quartermaster, on the other hand, is probably as comfortable working with malware as with actual bombs. “In another life, we would have made a spectacular team.”

The Quartermaster’s head comes up. “Now there’s an idea,” he says. He’s not grinning, exactly, but the corners of his mouth have pulled upwards. Lisbeth is not sure she likes the resultant expression. “What do you mean?”

He stands and she notes distractedly that his patchwork cardigan and corduroy trousers make for a truly unfortunate combination of colours. “James won’t be back for a while and I’m not leaving you unattended.” Before she can reply, he ducks down behind the sofa and emerges holding two cats to his chest, one black as tar, the other tawny in a leonine way. She stares. “Niklaus and Elio,”says the Quartermaster, nodding to each feline as he turns towards the hallway. “Come along then.” 

Lisbeth stands, more in self-defense than anything else. “Where are we going?” 

“To see the sights!” he calls back. When she doesn’t reply, he reappears around the corner, mysteriously divested of the cats. The half-smile is still on his face but she can’t read his eyes. “You want to know who he is now and how much of that was true when you were with him,” says the Quartermaster. “But you can’t know any of that without knowing me, or the place where we spend so much of our lives. So in the interests of committing fully to this madness, I am taking you on a little tour. The least you could do until it all goes to hell is play along.”

She doesn’t tell him that she has no idea what game they’re playing in the first place. She checks her weapons, accepts the cat carrier he puts in her arms, and follows him out of the flat and down the stairs to the street. Her motorcycle has vanished; a black car is idling at the curb. She freezes, but he strides forward without hesitation, hideously oversized parka flapping, hefting the other cat carrier in his arms. “Well, hurry up!” he calls, opening the door; he doesn’t try to hold it open. She stands on the pavement for a moment longer and then she looks down at the cat carrier in her arms and shrugs. The memory of bloody fur arrayed on a doorstep eels into her mind before she shoves it away. Perhaps this will be the mistake that kills her, but she remembers the look on Mikhail’s face that morning. She will choose to believe, now, that the man Mikhail - James - calls _love_ would not carry their cats into a car where they might end up the same way. And perhaps, just perhaps, he might feel the way about her, the woman Mikhail saved from a similar fate. Holding the carrier a little closer, she climbs inside the car and pulls the door shut behind her. 

**Author's Note:**

> Watching TGWTDT broke me a little and this is how I'm putting everything back together. Just getting started. Hope everyone is staying safe out there.


End file.
